Patricia Barber is often mentioned in the same breath
with Diana Krall and Norah Jones because she is a jazz singer-pianist.
But it would be more appropriate to talk about her in the same sentence
with Prince.

While he is the
most complete rock star ever, she is the most complete jazz artist today.
Barber, 48, is a first-rate, fiercely intellectual songwriter, the closest
thing we have to Cole Porter these days. She is an evocative, imaginative
singer who gets inside the most familiar of songs. She is a hypercreative,
expressive pianist who explores a variety of styles, moods and colors.
And, like Prince, in concert she is pridefully unpredictable and uncommonly
rewarding.

At the Dakota Jazz
Club on Tuesday, Barber started, as always, by sitting at the grand
piano and removing her shoes. Thereafter, she was not as prominent on
the keys as she has been at her previous Dakota engagements. An aggressive,
physical pianist, she was often more impressionistic or just silent,
letting her bandmates extend the conversation that she usually started.
With Barber, it's about making art, not about casting her as a star.

The Chicagoan seemed
to be going for the kind of dark intimacy heard on her wonderful new
CD, "Live: A Fortnight in France." Five of the eight pieces
in Tuesday's opening 70-minute set were taken from the new disc. Her
singing Gypsy-like "la-da-das" through clenched teeth led
into "Dansons la Gigue!," which suggested Charles Aznavour
doing a lethargic, late-night French-Brazilian art-song. The familiar
"Laura" was done slow and dreamy, about as delicate as Barber
gets.

Her Leonard Cohen-like
reading of "If I Should Lose You," a Frank Sinatra favorite,
and the intoxicating "Touch of Trash," her own 1999 number
recast with some Tom Waits-like bent guitar, fit the "Fortnight"
mood perfectly. "Trash" had the ideal irony for the erudite
band leader, as she closed the song about mismatched lovers singing
"watching us turn absolutely nothing into form."

Barber leads a
creative quartet, players who listen to each other as they make music.
In fact, watching her actively listen to her colleagues -- she'd tap
her fists to the beat, rub her fingers feverishly or sit with her mouth
agape -- was almost as intriguing as hearing her play piano. "Crash,"
a "Fortnight" instrumental featuring each player prominently,
was a bracing collision of fast and slow tempos that was almost as jarring
as the encore, "Whiteworld," a diatribe about First World
anthropology set to a guitar-driven funk groove.

If "Crash"
was a roaring four-alarm fire, then Barber's wacky 11-minute treatment
of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" was smoldering embers, eventually
restoked by Barber's piano solo and Neal Alger's trippy guitar noodling.
She didn't bother to change the gender of the lyrics, making it a lusciously
lesbian reflection on love. Even in subtle ways, Barber, like Prince,
always dares to push the envelope.